The standards of credibility we set for the physical behaviors of characters apply equally to what they say. Dialogue written for television, stage, or film must inspire believable performances in its actors. Scenes written for a novel or short story must inspire the reader to imagine credible behaviors in literary characters. So, no matter how complex and compelling the psychology of your characters, no matter how emotional and meaningful your story design, if your characters do not talk in a manner true to their natures, true to the setting and genre, the reader/audience loses faith. Unconvincing dialogue destroys interest faster than sour notes destroy a recital.

Hollow, phony dialogue cannot be cured with naturalism. If you eavesdrop on the conversations of your fellow passengers on planes, trains, and buses, you realize in a flash that you would never put those gossipy bull sessions on stage, page, or screen. Actual chatter repeats like a dribbling basketball. Everyday talk lacks vividness, resonance, expressivity, and, most critically, significance. Business meetings, for example, often roll on and on, hour after hour, without metaphor, simile, trope, or imagery of the least expressivity.

The crucial difference between conversation and dialogue is not the number, choice, or arrangement of words. The difference is content. Dialogue concentrates meaning; conversation dilutes it. Therefore, even in the most realistic settings and genres, credible dialogue does not imitate actuality.

In fact, credibility has no necessary relationship to actuality whatsoever. Characters who live in impossible worlds, such as Alice’s Wonderland, deliver lines that would never be said by a living person but are true to themselves and true to the settings.

In all settings from the most down-to-earth to the most magical, in all genres from war stories to musicals, in all styles of speech from inarticulate monosyllables to lyrical verse, dialogue should sound like the spontaneous talk of its characters. For that reason, we gauge dialogue against a standard of fictional authenticity, not factual accuracy. A character’s word choices and syntax should not be so true to life that they imitate the redundant banalities of the everyday. Rather, they must strike us as plausible and vernacular within the context of the story’s world and genre(s).

The reader/audience wants to believe that characters speak offstage, off-page, or offscreen exactly as they speak onstage, on the page, or onscreen, no matter how fantasized the story’s setting. Even in worlds as fantastic as Guillermo del Toro’s film PAN’S LABYRINTH, as absurd as Eugène Ionesco’s play Exit the King, as poetic as T. S. Eliot’s play Murder in the Cathedral, or as archaic as Robert Graves’s novel, I, Claudius, the cast’s talk need not be factual, but it must seem credible.

On the other hand, anyone might say anything at any time. So, how do we judge dialogue credibility? How do we know when a line is true to its character and true to the moment, or false on both counts?

Aesthetic judgment will never be a science. It is, by nature, as feeling as it is thoughtful. Instead, you must rely on skilled intuition, on your sense of rightness based on knowledge, experience, and inborn taste. Learn to judge your dialogue by listening past the words and sensing the harmony or disharmony between cause and effect. Dialogue rings true when a character’s verbal actions resonate with his motivations, when his inner desires and outer tactics seem to complement each other.

Exactly how you will master judgment in your own work is yours to discover, but to help guide you in that goal, below is a short list of faults that damage credibility: empty talk, overly emoted talk, overly knowing talk, overly perceptive talk, and excuses substituting for motivation.

EMPTY TALK

When a character speaks, the reader/audience looks into the subtext for a motivation to make sense out of the lines, a cause to explain the effect. If they find none, the dialogue sounds phony and the scene with it. The most commonplace example: one character telling another character something they both already know to satisfy the author’s expositional exigencies.

OVERLY EMOTIVE TALK

When a character uses language that seems far more emotional than his actual feelings, again the reader/audience wonders why and checks the subtext for an explanation. If they find none, they may assume that either this hyper-dramatic character is a hysteric or that the author is desperately trying to make too much out of too little. At some social/psychological level, emotive dialogue and its context should complement each other.

OVERLY KNOWING TALK

Know what your characters know. Characters are an author’s creatures, born of exhaustive research into the story’s setting and cast, countless observations of human behavior, and ruthless self-awareness. A bold line, therefore, runs between creator and created. Or should. But if a writer crosses that line and injects his author’s knowledge into his character’s awareness, we sense a cheat. When a character onscreen or onstage talks about current events with a breadth and depth of understanding only his author could have, or when a novel’s first-person protagonist looks back on past events with factuality and clarity of insight beyond his experience, again, the reader may sense that the author is whispering into his character’s ear.

OVERLY PERCEPTIVE TALK

Similarly, beware characters who know themselves better than you know yourself. When a character describes himself with a depth of insight more profound than Freud, Jung, and Socrates combined, readers and audiences not only recoil at the implausibility; they lose faith in the writer. Authors set traps for themselves when they create characters with excessive, unconvincing self-awareness.

It happens like this: Hardworking writers fill notebooks and files with character biographies and psychologies, generating ten or twenty times more material than they would directly use in the writing. They do this, as they must, to give themselves a surfeit of material in order to win the war on clichés with original, unexpected choices. Having amassed this knowledge, the desire to get all they know out into the world can become an irresistible temptation. Unwittingly, the author crosses the line between writer and character, turning his creation into a mouthpiece for his research.

EXCUSES MISTAKEN FOR MOTIVATION

Create honest motivation for behavior. In an effort to match a character’s over-the-top action with a cause, writers often backtrack to the character’s childhood, insert a trauma, and pass it off as motivation. Over recent decades, episodes of sexual abuse became an overused, all-purpose, mono-explanation for virtually any extreme behavior. Writers who resort to this kind of psychological shorthand do not understand the difference between excuse and motivation.

Motivations (hunger, sleep, sex, power, shelter, love, self-love, etc.) are needs that drive human nature and compel behavior.1 More often than not, these subconscious drives go unrecognized, and as often as not, cause more trouble than they cure. Unwilling to face the truth of why they do what they do, human beings invent excuses.

Suppose you were writing a pivotal scene for a political drama in which a national leader explains to his cabinet why he is taking the country to war. Throughout history, two primary motivations have driven one people to war against another. First, the drive for power abroad. Land, slaves, and wealth seized from the defeated empowers the victor. Second, the drive for power at home. When rulers fear losing strength, they provoke war to distract their citizens and regrip domestic power. (George Orwell dramatized both motivations in his masterpiece, 1984.)

These two motivations compel the reality of war, but no ruler who declares war thinks like that. Or if he does, he would never say it. So, to write your scene, you would have to bury motivation in the subtext, create a leader with just the right quality of self-deception, and then write his dialogue to frame an excuse other characters believe and follow.

Some of the excuses warring peoples have used throughout history include: “Saving souls for God” (Christian Crusades, Spanish Empire, Ottoman Empire), “Shining the light of civilization into the darkness of savagery” (British Empire), “Manifest Destiny” (genocide of Native Americans), “Purifying the race” (the holocaust), and “Transforming capitalist tyranny into Communist equality” (the Russian and Chinese revolutions).²

For an example of an excuse masquerading as motivation, consider Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Richard III. In Act 1, Scene 1, Richard, the hunchbacked Duke of Gloucester, says that because his deformity is repellent, he “cannot prove a lover.” So, instead he will “prove a villain” and murder everyone between himself and the throne.

Then, in the very next scene, Richard meets Anne, the beautiful widow of a rival he recently assassinated. She hates Richard and curses him, calling him the devil. Nonetheless, Richard, ugly as he is, guilty as he is, mounts a campaign of brilliant psychological seduction. He claims that because Anne is so breathtakingly beautiful and he is so desperately in love with her, he had to kill her husband in the hopes of having her. He then kneels down and offers her his sword so she can kill him, if she wishes. She declines and by the end of the scene this blend of flattery and self-pity wins her heart.

With that seduction, Richard reveals himself as a masterful lover. So why does he say he is not? Because he needs an excuse to mask his lust for power.

To write intriguing, layered, credible dialogue, first study the difference between the two motors for human action—motivation and justification. Then see if masking your characters’ subconscious drives with their conscious efforts to excuse, or to at least make sense out of their unexplainable behaviors, adds depth to their words.

In most cases, false dialogue is not the signature of an overly confident, overly knowledgeable writer, but the opposite: a nervous, unschooled writer. Anxiety is the natural by-product of ignorance. If you don’t know your character beyond his name, if you cannot imagine how he reacts, if you cannot hear his voice, if you write in bewilderment, your hand will scratch out nothing but bogus dialogue. In the fog of not knowing, you have no other choice.

Therefore, do the hard work. Surround your character with all the knowledge and imagining you can. Test his traits against the people around him and, most importantly, yourself. For at the end of the day, you are the touchstone of truth. Ask yourself: “If I were my character in this situation, what would I say?” Then listen with your most truth-sensitive ear for the honest, credible answer.

MELODRAMA

The adjective “melodramatic” indicts writing for excessiveness—shrill voices, lurid violence, tear-stained sentimentality, or sex scenes one shadow this side of pornography. On the other hand, Shakespeare’s The Tragedy of Othello rages with murderous jealousy; Sam Peckinpah’s THE WILD BUNCH turns violence into cinematic poetry; Stephen Sondheim’s A Little Night Music explores deep, painful sentiments; and Nagisa Oshima’s masterpiece IN THE REALM OF THE SENSES indulges explicit sex; and none of them is melodrama.

Long before Oedipus gouged out his eyes, great storytellers have sought the limits of human experience. Twenty-first-century artists continue this quest because they sense that the depths and breadths of human nature know no limits. Anything you can picture your characters doing, believe me, human beings have already done it and in ways beyond imagining.

The problem of melodrama, therefore, is not over-expression but under-motivation.

When a writer scores a scene with ping-ponging histrionics, trying to make a snit seem lethal; when he cascades tears down a character’s face, hoping to make a setback seem tragic; or when he forces behavior to exceed what’s actually at stake in a character’s life, we dismiss his work as melodrama.

Melodramatic dialogue, therefore, is not a matter of word choices. Human beings are capable of doing anything and saying anything while they do it. If you can imagine your character talking in a passionate, pleading, profane, or even violent way, then lift his motivation to match his action. Once you have behavior balanced with desire, take it a step further and ask yourself: “Would my character state or understate his action?”

Compare two versions of a “Cut off his head!” scene: Suppose GAME OF THRONES were to develop a plotline in which two kings fight each other in a long war to a blood-soaked end. Then comes the climax: The victorious king sprawls on his throne; his defeated enemy kneels at his feet, awaiting sentencing. A courtier asks the king, “What are your wishes, sire?” and the king screams his answer: “Smash every bone in his body! Burn his skin black, peel it off, and feed it to him! Rip his eyes from his head and his head from his neck.”

Or, the courtier asks the king’s wishes, and as the victor examines his manicure, he whispers, “Crucify him.”

The subtext under “Crucify him” implies a death as hideous as the screamed answer, but which answer conveys greater personal power? The lurid, harsh, overstated rant, or the simple, understated “Crucify him”?

Either answer could be perfectly in-character, but what kind of character? The first answer implies a weak king at the mercy of his emotions; the second suggests a powerful king in command of his emotions. In the matter of melodrama, motivation and character are never separate. What would drive one character over a cliff wouldn’t get another character off his sofa. Therefore, the balance of motivation versus action is unique to every role and has to be struck inside a character who first feels it and then does it.

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